The West’s Complicity in Terrorism – The Voice of Jacob and the Hand of Esau

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal reports on what it calls “A Bloody Month of Jihad.”

We fight Islamic terrorism with guns and drones, while we facilitate it with what you might call moral disarmament.

I was particularly saddened by news of the attack on a hotel in Nairobi, where at least 21 were killed. I’ve visited Kenya’s capital three times in the last 12 years, to speak at conferences. I have friends there. I’ve found the Kenyan people to be warm, generous and thoughtful.

No one is immune to these horrors. Besides Nairobi, The Journal mentions attacks in Manbij, Syria; Kabul, Afghanistan; Morocco (where two Scandinavian women were beheaded) and an attack on a Christmas market in Strasbourg, France.

It’s easy to blame Islamic terrorism, as well we should. The horrors are a natural outgrowth of an ideology masquerading as a religion We often cite verses in the Koran and note that terrorist groups don’t have names like the Episcopalian State or the Jewish Martyrs Brigade.

But what of our complicity?

A young George Washington led the colonial militia in the Battle of Monongahela during the French and Indian War. Washington made a great target — 6 feet tall, mounted on horseback. Every other officer on the British side was killed or wounded. Washington alone survived without a scratch.

Years later, an old sachem who fought there said that, at one point, he told his warriors to stop shooting at Washington, that they could not kill a man who the hand of the Great Spirit was over.

When Jacob takes the blessing meant for Esau, through a simple subterfuge — covering his hands and arms with animal skins, to simulate his hirsute brother — Isaac says, “The hands are the hands of Esau, but the voice is the voice of Jacob.”

Like most of the Torah, there are multiple layers of meaning. One is: When the voice of Jacob is raised, the hands of Esau (the un-G-dly) are lowered. But when the voice of Jacob (righteousness) is lowered, the hand of the savage is raised.

The West is mired in abortion, perversion, pornography and other evils that strike at the soul of our civilization. In many cases the debauchery is state-sanctioned, in some even state-mandated.

On January 7, they began performing abortions in Ireland, a nation that kept Christianity alive during the Dark Ages.

Worldwide terrorism seems to grow in intensity year by year. What do we expect? The Prophet Isaiah warns: “But your iniquities have made a separation between you and G-d, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.”

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